Artist Mel Kendrick, whose work is featured in a new, comprehensive exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, and his longtime friend and fellow artist Carroll Dunham will discuss their careers as artists and approach to artmaking on Saturday, January 14 from 3 to 4 p.m. at the museum.

Kendrick and Dunham were both former studio assistants to Parrish collection artist Dorothea Rockburne. The talk is presented in conjunction with “Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things,” the first major survey of Kendrick’s (American, b. 1949) work highlighting his four-decade career that explores how the artist pushes the limits of materials including wood, rubber and concrete to create sculpture that lays bare the process by which it was made.

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Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things

By Joyce Beckstein

Less is more, or is it? A young Mel Kendrick would find his own answers to what was, back in the day, an essential element of Minimalism: stripping art down to its basics. No excesses. No narratives. No emotions. No pedestals. Simply put, art was about the object. Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things presents a riveting survey of works, from 1983 to 2022, by an artist who absorbed Minimalism’s quirky mystique as he unabashedly broke most of its codifying rules.

Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Dorothea Rockburne, and Carl Andre, iconic practitioners of the movement, are among the mentors and friends with whom Kendrick alternately studied, worked, and schmoozed with at Max’s Kansas City, a favorite sixties and seventies haunt for the New York City avant-garde. The impact of Minimalism, its rationale, and the alternative paths Kendrick took to chart his own course are clear in the Parrish Art Museum’s reception gallery, where a recent wall relief, Thinking of What (2022), nods to Black Dots (1989–90), a soaring, free-standing wood sculpture.

For more than five decades, sculptor Mel Kendrick has created visual puzzles by taking things apart and putting them back together again. The resulting works invert spatial oppositions, giving dimension to feelings of inner conflict.

The artist’s retrospective, “Seeing Things in Things,” is an invitation to enjoy the traces of this conflict, which can be found in every gap, slip, and break of the art on display. While fundamentally abstract, early pieces such as Nemo, 1983, and Sculpture No. 2, 1991, flirt with figuration, transforming solid blocks of wood into forms that want to move and grow. The sculptures of the past twenty years, however, are far more distilled, reflecting an artist more willing to consider the material constraints of his medium. In Untitled (Green Block), 2007, Kendrick starts by drawing a web of calligraphic lines across each side of a hewn block of wood; the lines serve as a blueprint for cutting into the whole. The internal parts are then removed and placed on top of the remaining structure. The result is a mirrorlike sculpture where a negative image projects its solid counterpart, crossing a line of division embedded within each form. More recently, in Double Lock, 2015, and Standing Block (Black Concrete), 2020, Kendrick has applied the same procedure to expanded polystyrene, which he used to cast the results in black concrete. These sculptures are more self-contained, absorbing the heat of their surroundings and transmitting a solemn calm.

Like Narcissus gazing down at his reflection, the sculptures’ empty and solid forms create both harmonious and uneasy images. Infinite variations emerge, some coherent and some less so, yet each one makes the case that opposition is not something to be overcome, but something to be sustained and enjoyed.

Mel Kendrick on Seeing Things in Things by Barbara A. MacAdam

The title of sculptor Mel Kendrick’s exhibition “Seeing Things in Things” at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York is particularly apt. At 73 years old, Kendrick is famous for taking things apart, reassembling the fragments, and then reapplying them to create composite sculptures, letting his materials be his guide. He is what he does.

Most recently, Kendrick’s exhibition at the Parrish follows its debut at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. The choice of these two venues has allowed Kendrick to explore context as an element and inspiration in his creations, much as his materials are.

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Dear Readers,

Mel Kendrick’s work has always been mysterious and exciting for me to see.

I met Mel Kendrick through my father, the artist Tony Smith, when I was in my mid-to-late teens and Mel, being several years older than me, was already a grown-up.

I like Mel’s work very much. I think it is engaging in a way that is unique, as it is not sculpture trying to represent or copy the world. His work retains the integrity of the wood he uses and at the same time makes radical interventions and visceral formations.

I was very excited to be able to ask him questions. We talked this spring just before he installed a retrospective of his work, Seeing Things in Things, at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts.

As we spoke, I was leafing through Mel’s beautiful monograph, published by Rizzoli to accompany his exhibition.

All my best,
Kiki

ANDOVER — The title of Mel Kendrick’s first-ever major career retrospective is “Seeing Things in Things,” which sounds like a dodge because, at least partly, it is. Kendrick is noncommittal in that old-school Modernist way: For him, the work means nothing because it is nothing beyond, as the old saying goes, the thing itself. Kendrick, an alumnus of Phillips Academy, home to the splendid Addison Gallery of American Art, which mounted the show, might borrow from fellow Phillips artist alum Frank Stella: “What you see is what you see,” Stella once said when asked about his work, the ultimate verbal shrug. It’s an explanation by way of non sequitur.

Let’s not mistake the lack of commitment to language for the same in the work. Just the opposite: Kendrick’s oeuvre, almost all of it sculpture, is robust and imposing, alive with a zeal for making. The largest gallery here — “Seeing Things in Things” spans a half dozen rooms across the museum’s entire second floor — is a communion with giants. The hollowed trunk of a monstrous maple tree perches on angular timbers, like an ancient, crippled beast on crutches. Another work, composed of swoops of textured heavy wood beams, rears up like a startled cobra.

In the late 1950s, when artists started moving downtown, the area was a sprawling wasteland of low level buildings anchored by two largely industrial areas — what we now call SoHo and its neighbor immediately to the south, TriBeCa. Both had begun in the 1600s as colonial farmland; by the 19th century, both had transformed into a shopping and entertainment district, with large hotels, upscale department stores, theaters and hundreds of brothels. After the Civil War, the area became an important manufacturing center for textile firms and other industries, and the brothels were gradually replaced by clusters of cast-iron warehouses. By the 1950s, these warehouses were mostly being used for storage or sweatshops, and the neighborhood, increasingly decrepit, earned the nickname Hell’s Hundred Acres.

In retrospect, it seems destined that artists would colonize this place — for whom were these cavernous, empty spaces built if not for artists, like Donald Judd playing around with new and unwieldy ideas? — though it’s hard to overstate just how difficult it was to do. Living in these buildings, which were not zoned for residential occupation, was illegal, and the conditions were bleak: In some cases there was no working plumbing, water, heat or electricity. Artists were required by the city to post warning signs on the exteriors of these buildings that read A.I.R. — Artist in Residence — so that if there were a fire, the fire department would know to rescue them.

The New York sculptor’s memorable black-and-white woodblock prints, which he made in the early nineties, suggest pages of closely set type—if those pages were nine feet tall and seventeen feet wide. The interplay of chalky woodgrain patterns and speckled blacks is enlivened by sharp white lines, notably in “10 Loops 3,” in which two long, serrated shapes descend against a dark background. Anchoring the half-dozen prints is Kendrick’s jaggedly energetic “Black-Oil Sculpture No. 4,” a poplar construction darkened with lampblack—a dramatic drawing in three dimensions.

Based in New York since 1971, Mel Kendrick is best known as a sculptor, though he has consistently worked on drawings. This practice goes back a long time—the six woodblock works on exhibit date from 1992 to 1993. As Mark Pascale, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, explains in an accompanying catalogue essay, the imagery in these compositions result from being printed from “horizontally aligned sheets of plywood.” The application of ink is heavy, and the imagery looks thoroughly abstract. But, even so, Kendrick’s drawings display a lightness of being we might not expect from a body of work so dark in color. The group of drawings—Kendrick call these efforts “drawings” despite their having been printed—possesses a subtlety and a fineness that seems to lean slightly toward Asia. But it is impossible to culturally pin down their effect. Whatever cultures the artist may draw from, it remains clear that in both his sculptures and his two-dimensional works, he is an independent.

One of the most immediately striking qualities of 10 Loops 3 (1992) is its highly visible woodgrain, seen as thin white lines against a black background in the two trunk-like verticals that dominate the composition. The title refers to the ten loops that occur both inside and outside these massive-seeming tree trunks. Those loops inside the trunks are black, while those outside them are whitish. In the black expanse that forms the background, one sees myriad flecks of white, which give the impression of sweepings floating in cosmic space. Although the composition is abstract, given that Kendrick usually works with wood when he sculpts, we can take a leap and suggest that natural imagery is being implied by the two tree-like images. The curvilinear white outlines defining the loops give definition to what otherwise might be an inchoate presentation of form.  But this close description doesn’t do justice to the elegance, and also the mystery, of what we see. We might well expect such critically reticent work from Kendrick, whose art has often seemed self-referential and thematically contained.

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